blog

Emotional memories of traumatic life events are stored in a particular way by the brain. For many of us, our deepest memories are mental snapshots taken during times of high emotional impact or involvement. When someone experiences something traumatic, the memory is stored, in random bits and pieces, in the right hemisphere of the brain instead of in the left hemisphere like normal memories. These unprocessed memories are stored in the brain in a 'raw' form where they can be continually re-evoked when experiencing events that are similar to the original experience. They are stored in the brain with all the sights, sounds, thoughts and feelings that accompany it. This explains why people usually cannot recollect the full memory of the traumatic experience and it also explains why people do not like to talk about it. This is because it doesn't make them feel any better! Talking is an activity that accesses the left hemisphere, not the right.

Therefore, the negative thoughts and feelings of the traumatic event are trapped in the nervous system. Since the brain cannot process these emotions, the experience and/or its accompanying feelings are often suppressed from consciousness. However, the distress lives on in the nervous system where it causes disturbances in the emotional functioning of the person.

The right side is the hemisphere that does more intuitive thinking and is more fantasy oriented. So drawing, painting, singing, and any other form of artistic expression for that matter, does access the right side hemisphere. In fact, Art Therapy facilitates communication between the right and left hemispheres, by guiding the right brain process of the client through left brain instructions from the therapist, allowing the brain to process the traumatic experience as a normal memory. This is why, even if the client never talks about the experience, they do feel better after an Art Therapy session. The traumatic experience slowly becomes a normal memory instead of a trauma and the negative effect the trauma had on the person's emotional life slowly disappears.